Schmidt Futures is creating the US$40-million Virtual Institute of Scientific Software to fund the maintenance of researcher-written code.
See whether this sounds familiar: you build a piece of software to solve a research question. But when you move on to the next project, there’s no one to maintain it. As it ages, it becomes obsolete, and the next academic to tackle a similar problem finds themselves having to reinvent the wheel.
The institute will initially fund projects at the University of Cambridge, UK; the University of Washington in Seattle; Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland; and the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. It’s still early days, but several software projects are already lined up for support, Feldman says.
Still, there’s a limit to how far Schmidt’s investment can go. Hiring good engineers in places like Seattle and Cambridge is expensive, because universities are competing against the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta. “It’s tricky,” says Chris Edsall, head of research software engineering at the University of Cambridge’s Research Computing Services. “We can’t unfortunately compete on salary.”Instead, VISS is banking on the lure of the research itself.
Computer scientist Alexander Szalay, who is helping to set up a VISS centre at Johns Hopkins, agrees, noting that very few programs get to a point where enough researchers use and update them to remain useful. “They don’t survive this ‘Valley of Death’,” he says. “The funding stops when they actually develop the software prototype.”
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